People's Action Party Research Articles

Ensuring good governance in Singapore

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to attribute Singapore's good governance to the effective policies implemented by the People's Action Party (PAP) government and contend that it will be difficult to transfer Singapore's experience to other countries because of Singapore's unique circumstances and favourable policy context.Design/methodology/approachThe paper analyses four policies initiated by the PAP government: comprehensive reform of the Singapore Civil Service; anti‐corruption measures; decentralization of the Public Service Commission; and payment of competitive salaries to attract and retain the best candidates to the government. The effectiveness of these policies is assessed by referring to Singapore's performance on eight governance indicators.FindingsThe four policies are effective, as reflected in Singapore's superior rankings and scores on eight indicators: Global Competitiveness Report's (GCR's) competence of public officials; World Bank's indicator on government effectiveness; Political Economic Risk Consultancy's (PERC's) survey on bureaucratic effectiveness; Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index; PERC's survey on corruption; World Bank's indicator on control of corruption; World Bank's ease of doing business survey; and GCR's public trust of politicians survey. However, as Singapore's good governance is the result of the PAP government's political will and its favourable policy context, it is difficult to transfer Singapore's experience elsewhere because of the limited political will and unfavourable policy contexts in many Asian countries.Originality/valueThis paper will be useful to those interested in learning how Singapore succeeded in promoting good governance.

Xenophobia online: unmasking Singaporean attitudes towards ‘foreign talent’ migrants

In recent years, Singaporeans have become highly anxious about the future of their country and their own personal livelihood due to the influx of educated and professional migrants known as ‘foreign talent’ and express their ire at the presence of these migrants through xenophobic posts online. This article suggests that such comments, however, are indicative of the feelings of disillusionment and abandonment Singaporeans have towards the People's Action Party – the only government Singaporeans have ever known. While Singaporeans have been critical of their government on economic issues that impact their lifestyle and existence, it is the presence of foreign talent migrants that have pushed Singaporeans into using the migrant situation to emotively express their opinions of disappointment in the government and its policies online like no other issue, functioning as the unlikely glue that has galvanised and united an ethnically disparate Singaporean population.

A Global City in an Age of Global Risks: Singapore’s Evolving Discourse on Vulnerability

As Singapore becomes a leading city, perceptions of the country's vulnerability are evolving as a result of its hyper-connectivity and exposure to risks. First-generation leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew, S. Rajaratnam and Goh Keng Swee of the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) viewed Singapore's strategic predicament as a function of its miniscule size and lack of resources and hinterland, as well as the country's turbulent history and a multi-ethnic population surrounded by larger Muslim neighbours. To overcome its vulnerabilities, its first foreign minister, S. Rajaratnam, presented the alluring vision of Singapore as a that would become a key node in the international system coordinating flows of trade, money, materials, goods and people. Singapore's hub status in maintaining the smooth functioning of the economy would also enhance its strategic relevance: major powers would have a vested interest in the country's survival. Being a city, however, is not without its perils. Singaporean leaders have long realized that recent crises (e.g. pandemics, financial meltdowns etc.) affecting Singapore are related to its position as a highly connected urban node in the age of interdependence. This paper examines the conundrum in Singapore's attempts to deal with its perceived vulnerabilities. While the drive to become a global city articulated by Rajaratnam has largely succeeded, Singapore's highly globalized status has ironically meant vulnerabilities to fast-spreading phenomena that characterize what sociologist Ulrich Beck terms a global risk society. The first section outlines the core components of Singapore's early post-independence vulnerability as expressed by its leaders, providing a baseline for comparison. The second section describes Rajaratnam's vision to ameliorate such professed vulnerabilities and examines measures of its connectivity as a sign of success. The final section shows how becoming a as part of an attempt to enhance survival prospects has paradoxically introduced new elements into Singapore's earlier discourse on vulnerability. A discourse analysis is undertaken to identify emerging features of Singaporean leaders' perception of vulnerability to risks. Key sources of data include policy documents, media interviews, speeches and statements. The focus here is on recurrent patterns whereby key code words to convey certain ideas are shared among political leaders holding Cabinet-level positions or senior policy-makers with Director-General or above rank in government bureaucracies. The sample is fairly representative of elite beliefs, drawing from the Prime Minister to a range of ministers and senior bureaucrats holding diverse portfolios from customs, transport, defence, health, to monetary regulation. These political and bureaucratic elites hold policy responsibilities for addressing vulnerability-related issues in their specific areas of work. Corporate elites are thus not included to the same extent in this analysis. The paper concludes that vulnerability is now seen to be coalescing around three types of critical infrastructure that Singapore paradoxically depends on to coordinate flows as a city. First, as a maritime port hub, Singapore faces exposure to Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) proliferation. Second, its aviation hub at Changi can also become a gateway for importing pandemics. Third, its financial centre is exposed to terrorist financing risks and financial contagion. Singapore's Early Notion of Vulnerability This paper concentrates on Singapore's perceived vulnerability, assuming in good faith that the leaders quoted believed what they said. (1) There are of course difficulties with analysing so-called crisis rhetoric, because whether Lee's or the PAP's private sense making coincided with their public pronouncements remains unclear. ... they might have believed their own, self-confident rhetoric. …

The Suppressed in the Modern Urbanscape: Cultural Difference and Film in Singapore

The Singapore People's Action Party (PAP) state's adapted Euro-US modernist impulses were reflected not in high cultural achievements but in building construction. Since independence, the PAP has revamped Singapore's colonial downtown into a conceptually empty postnational space filled with decontextualized buildings designed by famous foreign architects. While this uniformly high-rise environment and urban development is common among the high-economic-growth East and Southeast Asia countries since the 1980s, one difference in Singapore's urbanism is a utopian belief that once existed in the advanced West — that rational design will make rational societies without superfluousness. The commercial downtown and successful public housing jointly become the embodiment of a uniform urban space of physical perfectibility. An important part of the emergence of Singapore contemporary art practices has been the exploration in 1990s independent film of the suppressed nonelite subjectivities in public housing. Some filmmakers took public housing to be a space separate from the commercial downtown, and they suggested that this space represents an ambivalent site of modernity in its relationship to increasingly elitist capitalist development—they constitute a geography that indicates sociocultural difference. The filmmakers, in attempting to map an urban space capable of yielding knowledge of nonelite people, also attempt to delineate the interiority of a major part of Singapore's city space, given that 80 percent of the population lives in public housing. The films inscribe city space by depicting the ordinary and the potentially tragic cultural meanings that are emitted from this place. They represent an interest in depictions of class, though not in class-based politics. Such films also mark the imaginative disappearance of a colonial “tropical” city for an urban world now thoroughly modernized. The representative films undertaking explorations of class and the urban environment that form the focus of this article are Eric Khoo's Mee Pok Man (1995), Kelvin Tong and Jasmine Ng's Eating Air: A Motorcycle Kungfu Love Story (1999), and Royston Tan's 15 (2002). The filmmakers accept the “arrival” of the extended public-housing cityscape as a fait accompli and an iconic marker of Singaporean identity. However, they also look at public housing as locales where utopian impulses foster dystopic places that possess diverse cultures under erasure or suppression, and in which there is no past, only endlessly present space. Critical independent film, like much of the contemporary film since the 1980s, displays dissatisfaction with the stifling enclosure of a quasi-authoritarian late modernity, and from which a thematized break is longed for. This essay examines the similar and contrasting means by which three filmmakers present the city-state as a palimpsest of suppressed urban cultures.

Singapore. The AWARE saga: Civil society and public morality in Singapore. Edited by Terence Chong. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2011. Pp. 181. Bibliography, Index.

The AWARE saga: Civil society and public morality in Singapore Edited by TERENCE CHONG Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2011. Pp. 181. Bibliography, Index. The image of a subservient and obedient citizenry in Singapore has probably been derived from a seemingly authoritarian political culture determined largely by the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) that has been in power since the republic gained self-rule in 1959. Under the watchful and paternalistic gaze of its senior statesman Lee Kuan Yew, his son Lee Hsien Loong and their efficient Mandarins, there has been effectively little trace of active dissent in the republic. In reality, the coherence of the PAP-run state is an exception rather than the norm in contemporary Singapore where angry disagreements in country clubs, cultural associations and corporations often spill into the public arena in extra-general meetings (EGMs) reported enthusiastically by the government-controlled media seeking juicier local news than official exhortations and lectures at ribbon-cutting occasions. In 2009, the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE), which has been quietly promoting women's rights in Singapore, hogged significant attention in the republic's media. A sequence of sensationalised events within AWARE, beginning from a coup by a predominantly conservative Christian women's group orchestrated by a 'feminist mentor' to their unceremonious ejection by secular activists some two months later in a boisterous EGM, to the government's balancing act in keeping the church separate from politics within the next few months, revealed Singapore's undercurrents. In the end, while the prime minister chided the Christian Right openly for trying to use religion to lobby their cause, the government also simultaneously reaffirmed its conservatism by suspending AWARE from the Education Ministry's Sexuality Education programmes. Thinking that this saga deserved to be more rigorously reflected upon, sociologist Terence Chong brought together 11 observers in an edited volume, The AWARE saga: Civil society and public morality in Singapore. The contributors are a mix of academics from a range of disciplinary backgrounds--Chua Beng Huat, Gillian Koh, Eugene Tan, Theresa W. Devasahayam, Lai Ah Eng, Alex Tham and Vivienne Wee--as well as journalists and lay observers--Dominic Chua, James Koh, Loh Chee Kong and Jack Yong. In many ways, the AWARE saga has allowed the contributors to open up new perspectives on the changes surrounding a post-industrial Singapore where an increasingly educated and opinionated populace is contesting the moral economy of a neo-liberal landscape. As Chua and Chong argue, this landscape becomes embodied in the politics of sexuality given the transition towards a cultural economy of creative and entertainment industries, including casinos and gay bars, which has been seen by the Christian Right as legitimising the Babylonian sins of promiscuity and homosexuality in Singapore. …

Business-Government Relations and Institutional Leadership in Singapore: The Case of the Singapore National Employers’ Federation

Industrial peace and rapid economic development have been central goals of the People’s Action Party (PAP) which has dominated Singapore’s government for more than 50 years. It gradually established a comprehensive tripartite corporatist system to achieve and maintain those goals. Industrial peace was also important for its strategy of attracting and retaining foreign direct investment, as was forging successful business-government relations. Until the formation of the Singapore National Employers’ Federation (SNEF) in 1980, employer representation remained fragmented. Faced with the enormous social and economic challenges it had unleashed through its second industrial revolution in 1979, the PAP required coordinated employer engagement in its principal corporatist bodies through a single authoritative employer voice. PAP’s role in fostering the SNEF’s formation demonstrated how institutional links contributed to a more effective distributed pattern of leadership in national business and labour coordination. We contend that by incorporating Asian values and institutional leadership, the Singaporean government adroitly interwove political and economic priorities with business interests in building coordinating mechanisms and successful policies to secure national success.

Singapore's Cultural Experimentation: Gay Rights, Stem Cells, Casinos and the Evangelical Response

Since the early 1990s the Singapore government has been taking a more liberal stance on controversial issues such as gay rights, embryonic stem cell research and the gaming industry. My paper analyses the Singapore state's utilitarian justification and its authoritarian enactment of these liberal policies. The first part looks at the underlying motivation for the cultural makeover. I frame my analysis around the reaction of the Singapore Christian community to these developments. I focus on the criticisms of the state's ‘liberal’ agenda made by Evangelicals, and describe how the People's Action Party (PAP) regime has defended these policies on utilitarian grounds. The first part ends with a comparative analysis of how the ‘cultural war’ debate was played out in Singapore and the USA. In the second part I examine the procedural aspects of this cultural experimentation. I start with a review of Singapore's political reform. I show that civil society in Singapore has attained a new openness. Yet there remain constraints, leading critics to label the PAP-led government as a ‘soft-authoritarian’ democracy. Singapore's cultural policies, I explain, are essentially an ‘elitist’ state-engineered top-down development. This is in contrast to the experience in the USA, where grassroots activists exercise tangible bottom-up influence on how cultural contests are resolved. My main thesis is to argue that Singapore's recent cultural liberalisation is guided by social–economic expediency notwithstanding the alleged moral risks, and that these are state-commanded liberal experimentations, imposed by the ruling elite upon a constituency that is still largely conservative in moral outlook.

Singapore's Founding Fathers: An Era Drawing to a Close

On 3 February 2012, Dr Toh Chin Chye, a key founding father of modern Singapore, died at the age of 90. It was he who suggested that the People's Action Party (PAP) be established as a political pa...

The role and development of sport in Singapore since 1959

This article examines the development of recreational mass sport and the roles that it has played in the societal and national development of Singapore since 1959, when self-government was first attained. The article discusses the factors involved in its development and the political role played by the government led by the People's Action Party (PAP), which effectively fulfilled their leadership duties during periods of instability and has been dominant in leading the development of sport in ways that are consistent with the overall national development strategy.

Singapore in 2011

Abstract In 2011, Singaporeans voted in parliamentary and presidential elections. The social networking media, dominated by alternative reporting and commentary, played a significant role in generating political interest and mobilizing oppositional thinking and support. Faced with a stronger oppositional presence and a politically emboldened electorate, the People's Action Party government won the elections but achieved its worst results ever.

The Ideology of Pragmatism: Neo-liberal Globalisation and Political Authoritarianism in Singapore

This article uncovers the strongly ideological quality in Singapore's theory and practice of pragmatism. It also points to a strongly pragmatic quality in the ideological negotiations that play out within the dynamics of hegemony. In this complex relationship, the combination of ideological and pragmatic manoeuvring over the decades has resulted in the historic political dominance of the People's Action Party (PAP) government in partnership with global capital. But in an evolving, diversifying and globalising society, this manoeuvring has also engendered a number of mismatched expectations. It has also seen a greater sensitivity and attention to the inherent ideological contradictions and socio-economic inequalities that may erode what has been a relatively stable partnership between state and capital. This article argues that Singapore's one-party dominant state is the result of continuous ideological work that deploys the rhetoric of pragmatism to link the notion of Singapore's impressive success and future prospects to its ability to attract global capital. In turn, this relies on maintaining a stable political system dominated by an experienced, meritocratic and technocratic PAP government. While this Singaporean conventional wisdom has supported the political and economic interests of the state and global capital in a period of neo-liberal globalisation, its internal contradictions and external pressures have also begun to challenge its hegemonic pre-eminence.

Politics and Ethnicity: Framing Racial Discrimination in Singapore

Racial discrimination is a global phenomenon that the United Nations seeks to eradicate. In contemporary Singapore, research shows that the basis for racial discrimination is anchored in the role of ethnic identity and how it frames the formulation of policies related to education, employment, housing, immigration and politics. These policies have been formulated and implemented by the People's Action Party (PAP) government that has been in power for over 50 years. When confronted with its racially based policies, the PAP government insists that it follows a tolerant approach towards different races and that it promotes the idea of multiculturalism and meritocracy as a racial equalizer. However, ethnic minorities in Singapore complain they are being discriminated against
 daily on the basis of their race or religion. They argue that their views are often not given airing in the local mainstream media and they are further prevented from discussing these issues openly due to legislation restricting freedom of expression and assembly on these matters. Given this background, the first visit of a UN Rapporteur on racism to Singapore, at the invitation of the PAP government in April 2010, allowed the city-state's race-based policies to be put in an international spotlight. This study examines the visit of the UN Rapporteur, his initial findings, government and civil society responses, and the significance of this first UN mission. The paper locates its research on racial discrimination in the context of Singapore's political framework and the United Nations' efforts to eradicate racism. It argues that ultimately, policy changes in Singapore can only take place as a result of politically challenging the PAP government.

Filling the Moral Void: The Christian Right in Singapore

In March 2009 a group of Anglican Pentecostal women took over the Association of Women for Action and Research, a secular women's rights group in Singapore. This sparked an intense month-long public debate over a variety of issues which included the increasing aggression of the “Christian Right,” the secular nature of public space in Singapore, sex education and tolerance for gay communities, culminating in state intervention. While conventional sociological studies have suggested a variety of explanations for the growing presence of Pentecostal Christians in the public sphere, such as religious stratification or their links to party politics, few have examined it within the framework of nation-building. This paper seeks to understand the recent emergence of the “Christian Right” and its exposition on various moral issues within a historical context – a context from which the People's Action Party government successfully arose, in part, due to its self-construction as a moral state, and argues that the post-industrial challenges of globalisation have forced the government to be less morally conservative, resulting in a perceived moral vacuum which certain segments of Pentecostal Christians have felt compelled to fill.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Decline of the Left in Singapore

Abstract Represented by the Barisan party and mainly participated in by ethnic Chinese, the leftist movement in Singapore was the thrust behind the island’s independence (1965) and the major political opposition to the ruling PAP (People’s Action Party). But within several years after independence, the movement disappeared as the PAP’s one-party regime grew in strength. Based on the leftist publications of that period, this article argues that Maoist China’s influence, the Cultural Revolution in particular, significantly contributed to the decline of the movement. The radicalization and dissolution of Singapore’s leftist movement was one example of the destructive impact of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution on overseas Chinese politics in the 1960s.

‘Back Regions’ and ‘Dark Secrets’ in Singapore: The Politics of Censorship and Liberalisation

The political transition from Lee Kuan Yew to Goh Chok Tong to Lee Hsien Loong has generally been interpreted as a trajectory of gradual liberalisation in Singapore. This discourse of liberalisation is encouraged by a variety of factors such as policy changes over censorship regulations, a younger and more cosmopolitan polity, the government's global city ambition and desire to turn the city-state into a creative hub. Such factors, however, often obscure the contemporary policing dynamics of the People's Action Party (PAP) state. Using Erving Goffman's concepts of the ‘back’ and ‘front’ regions, this paper will demonstrate how the PAP state operates in different social spaces and how it engages in the different politics of these spaces. Using specific cases from the theatre community, this paper argues that the discourse of liberalisation has grown because the PAP state has, in recent times, exercised its censorship powers in the ‘back regions’ of theatre, away from the media and public. Finally, it will examine recent amendments to the Films Act and the Public Order Act which clamps down on acts of civil disobedience, and show that this is consistent with what Goffman calls ‘dark secrets’—that is, facts that are incompatible with an individual's or institution's public image.

The cultural logic of a capitalist single-party state, Singapore

Singapore is a settler nation in which the majority population is descended not from White colonizers but from Chinese migrants. Being without proprietary claim to the land, the new postcolonial island-nation declared itself a constitutional ‘multiracial’ nation of Huaren, Malays and Indians, without the isomorphism of race, culture and nation. Lacking a pre-colonial political structure, the new nation was constituted on the template of a modern nation-state, with all the liberal rights and freedoms that this implies, and where the government is to be established by popular mandate through periodic general elections. Operating within the political space framed by these two conditions, the People's Action Party—which has governed without effective opposition since 1959—has been able to manoeuvre between the logic of individual competition in the capitalist economy and the logic of equality between racial groups in social and cultural administration, pragmatically privileging one set of rationales over the other as the situation requires. Thus, the ideology of meritocracy is emphasized in the kinds of individual competition that determine and allocate educational and economic opportunities, thus individualizing economic success or failure. On the other hand, equality of race is emphasized in the management of cultural policies and in the administering and policing of race relations, including the suppression of conventional claims for redress made by racial groups which consider themselves discriminated against or marginalized. Racial harmony as a public moral good is evoked as an instrument for the management of race rather than as an arena for deepening the understanding and mixing of cultures. These strictures of the single-party state disrupt the universalizing desire of contemporary liberalism propagated by the West, providing other East Asian nations with the possibility of an alternative mode of capitalist development without a multi-party polity.

The State and the New Society: The Role of the Arts in Singapore Nation-building

This paper takes an historical perspective on the trajectory of Singapore's arts and cultural landscape from 1965 to 2000. It examines the arts and cultural field as an ideological site within which the People's Action Party government constantly sought to reinvent or vision a new society. From harnessing the arts for the task of creating “civilised” and “cultured” citizens immediately after independence, as well as to play out multicultural fantasies, to the government's ‘Global City for the Arts' project in the 1990s for economic imperatives, arts and culture has not only been ideologically instrumental for nation-building purposes but also malleable to the ruling elite's changing visions of Singapore society. The PAP government's deployment of art to establish orthodoxy is a recurring feature in the paper, including its cooption of “renaissance” themes as early as 1980, thus purging ideals of romanticism from public discourse. The paper concludes that Singapore's cultural policy, although driven by economic impulses, will continue to be an important ideological instrument for nation-building.

Dangerous Migrants and the Informal Mobile City of Postwar Singapore

This paper examines the struggle between the state and urban kampong population over the form and content of the ‘mobile city’ in postwar Singapore. As large numbers of low‐income Chinese moved into an expanding belt of informal settlements on the urban periphery, there emerged a semi‐autonomous way of life, characterised by underemployment and co‐existence with free‐ranging pigs and poultry, which were deeply abhorrent to both the British colonial and People’s Action Party (PAP) governments. Both authorities discursively represented the kampongs as ‘insanitary, congested and dangerous’ in order to render the urban margin legible through clearance and resettlement. The state of emergency occasioned by the outbreak of massive fires, the suppression of leftwing rural organisations and the robust acquisition of land for public development enabled the state to relocate the dwellers to public housing estates built over the urban kampongs in the 1960s. The transformation of ‘squatters’ into model ‘citizens’ gave rise to a new high modernist mobile city, where mobility and housing were dictated on the terms of the state.

Singapore in transition: economic change and political consequences

With Lee Hsien Loong's ascendancy to the prime ministership of Singapore, there has been a general recognition that whilst this heralded a change in generational leadership, little expectation exists that any fundamental political change will take place. This paper argues that, rather than examining the current actors for signs of political change, economic changes within the Singaporean economy are a more fruitful source of political change analysis. By political change the author does not mean any diminishing of the dominance of the People's Action Party, but a change in the ‘type’ of political actors that will be required to ensure Singapore's future economic success.

Being Chinese under official multiculturalism in Singapore

At the time of independence, there were three visible racial groups among its newly constituted citizenry: an overwhelming majority of ethnic Chinese; regionally indigenous Malays and a small percentage of South Asians. The Cold War conditions precluded the island-state from being a Chinese majority state; constitutionally the new state was declared a multiracial nation. The three groups were reconstituted as Huaren, Malays and Indians. Multiracialism as official policy has become a means of governance of the People's Action Party single-party dominant government. Racial harmony as the public good provides the political and administrative space for the policing of racial boundaries, suppressing open discussion of racial issues. Meanwhile, Huaren culture has been progressively reduced to emphasis on filial piety as Confucianism writ small and an emergent Singaporean identity distances the local born Huaren from the ‘foreign workers’ that arrive daily from the People's Republic of China.